This invention relates generally to decimal floating point arithmetic, and more particularly, to the design and implementation of a wide decimal adder for computing the coefficient results for decimal floating point operands.
Several techniques of designing adder units for performing high speed additions of decimal operands consisting of a plurality of decimal digits are disclosed by Schmookler and Weinberger in “High Speed Decimal Addition”, IEEE Transactions on Computers, Volume 20, No. 8, August 1971, pages 862-866. These techniques provide a direct production of decimal sums without the need of first producing the binary sums, and they avoid the decimal correction of the result in an additional operation cycle by adding six to each sum digit where a carry is produced. The techniques use carry generate and propagate functions for the decimal digits to perform a carry look ahead function over the digit positions and for the direct production of the decimal sum digits.
A combined binary/decimal adder unit using a carry look ahead logic through a plurality of decimal digit positions and a direct production of the decimal sum digits is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,928,316 to Haller et al., of common assignment herewith. The unit pre-sums are generated for each decimal position in parallel to the generation and distribution of the carries over the total of decimal digit positions of the adder unit. The pre-sums anticipate the carry-in of the decimal positions and the need to perform plus six corrections after the carry-out signal of the highest decimal digit position has been generated. The carry-out signal of each decimal digit position is used in combination with operation control signals to select the correct pre-sum of the digit position.
As the speed of microprocessors continues to increase, the amount of computation that can be done in a single cycle decreases. For decimal floating point operations implemented in computer systems with aggressive cycle times, the carry chain required for a wide adder prevents the full addition from being computed in a single cycle. Because it cannot be completed in single cycle, the wide adder may limit the performance of the rest of the computer system. It would be desirable to be able to implement a wide adder that does not limit the performance of the rest of the computer system.